Maxinquaye
Maxinquaye is the debut studio album by English rapper and producer Tricky, released on 20 February 1995 by 4th & B'way Records, a subsidiary of Island Records. In the years leading up to the album, Tricky had grown frustrated with his limited role in the musical group Massive Attack and wanted to pursue an independent project. Shortly after, he met with vocalist Martina Topley-Bird, who he felt would offer a wider vision to his music, and signed a solo contract with 4th & B'way in 1993. Tricky recorded Maxinquaye the following year primarily at his home studio in London, with Topley-Bird serving as the album's main vocalist, while Alison Goldfrapp, Ragga and Mark Stewart performed additional vocals.
With assistance from fellow producer Mark Saunders, Tricky used dub music techniques and heavily altered samples taken from a variety of sources to produce Maxinquaye. Its resulting groove-oriented downbeat, hazy and fragmented sound incorporates elements from hip hop, soul, rock, ambient techno, reggae and experimental music. Tricky's lyrics throughout the album explore themes of cultural decline, dysfunctional sexual relationships, fear of intimacy and recreational drug use, as he drew on his experiences in British drug culture and the influence of his late mother Maxine Quaye, after whom the album is titled.
Maxinquaye reached the number three position on the United Kingdom's albums chart and sold over 100,000 copies in its first few months of release. 4th & B'way marketed the album by relying on independent record promoters and Tricky's appearances in media, including publicity photographs and music videos that portrayed him and Topley-Bird in gender-bending fashion. Maxinquaye was cited by many journalists as the year's best record and the key release of the burgeoning trip hop genre. Since then, it has sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and ranks frequently on lists of the greatest albums, while regarded as a significant influence on electronica, underground hip hop and British hip hop.
Background
Following a troubled upbringing in the Knowle West neighbourhood of Bristol, Tricky joined the multimedia collective The Wild Bunch during the late 1980s. As part of the collective, he helped arrange sound systems around Bristol's club scene, and performed under a stage name derived from "Tricky Kid", the nickname given to him in a street gang as a youth. The Wild Bunch signed a record deal with 4th & B'way Records and released two singles, but their slow, experimental sound failed to make a commercial impact. The collective dissolved in 1989, which led to a few of its members forming the group Massive Attack. Tricky became a frequent collaborator who rapped over their productions, but quit after finding his role in the group to be limited; he later reworked material he had written for Massive Attack on Maxinquaye.In 1993, Tricky met with Martina Topley-Bird, then a teenager at Clifton College, after he saw her sitting against a wall near his house singing to herself. "That's really how it happened", she recalled. "A few weeks later, I went around to his house with some friends. We'd been drinking cider after our GCSEs. We were banging on his door, but he wasn't in. Then Mark Stewart, who lived there, came up to us and said: 'Yeah, this is Tricky's house, jump in through the window.'" Tricky's lyricism had matured from raps about street violence and sex to more personal and introspective writing, but Topley-Bird described his material for Maxinquaye as "quite depressing", which he believed was because of her more privileged background: "It's just reality. She's been a student all her life, grew up in Somerset, and I don't think she's ever faced the real world. She finds it all a bit weird. But she's my best mate."
They formed a musical and romantic partnership over subsequent years, and they produced "Aftermath", which subsequently appears on Maxinquaye. After offering the song to Massive Attack, who were not interested in including it on their 1991 album Blue Lines, Tricky released "Aftermath" independently to local record stores in September 1993 before he signed a record deal with 4th & B'way.
Recording and production
Tricky asked Mark Saunders to co-produce Maxinquaye after being impressed by his previous work with the rock band The Cure on their albums Mixed Up and Wish. They recorded Maxinquaye in the first half of 1994 at Tricky's home studio in Kilburn; further recording later took place at the Loveshack and Eastcote studios in Notting Hill. Island Records, 4th & B'Way's parent label, set up equipment in the home studio at Tricky's request, including an Akai S1000 sampler, an Atari 1040 computer with Logic software, an Alesis ADAT recorder, an AKG C3000 microphone, a Behringer Composer compressor and a Mackie 1604 mixing desk.The recording sessions were somewhat chaotic, and Saunders, who had the impression he would only perform engineering duties, often found himself serving as a DJ and programmer. Tricky instructed him on what to sample, regardless of different tempos and pitches, and asked him to piece the results together, something Saunders achieved by pitch-shifting the respective samples until the combination sounded satisfactory. The samples they experimented with were taken from the many vinyl records that Saunders recalled were "littered" all over Tricky's floor. Influenced by dub music's production techniques, Tricky exhaustively altered borrowed sounds on his sampler, mixed tracks as they were being recorded live in the studio, and preserved sounds that otherwise would have been unwanted in the final mix, including glitches and crackles.
Tricky had no concept of pitch and no regard for notational conventions or time signatures, nor any previous experience with sampling. Consequently, his approach to Maxinquaye challenged Saunders to rethink his ideas about music production and experiment in ways he had never tried before. Saunders was asked to combine samples of two songs that were 30 beats per minute apart and composed in entirely different keys. " thought differently to anybody I've ever known", he recalled. "It didn't occur to me that by de-tuning one to slow it down, both might then gel musically at that point. I always think of it like going into a scrapyard and building a car out of all the bits you can find. You could probably build a car that would work, and although it might be the ugliest you've ever seen, it would have loads of character."
According to the American critic Robert Christgau, Maxinquayes groove-oriented and low-tempo music drew not only on dub but also on lo-fi, ambient techno and hip hop, while James Hunter from Rolling Stone said Tricky subsumed American hip hop, soul, reggae and 1980s English rock sounds into "a mercurial style of dance music". Entertainment Weeklys resident critic David Browne classified the music as an intellectual form of R&B. Ben Walsh of The Independent called it an experimental album featuring a "heady blend" of soul, rock, punk, hip hop, dub and electronica. In Tricky's own words, he composed his songs based on a particular sound he liked rather than having a definite song structure in mind: "I couldn't write you a blues track or a hip-hop track if you asked. I just make what I hear and then me and Martina sing all the words on paper, putting the emphasis on the things that perhaps shouldn't be sung."
Almost all of Topley-Bird's vocals on Maxinquaye were recorded in a single take, a process she later said was "totally instinctive. There was no time to drum up an alter ego." Topley-Bird, a soft-spoken singer, found herself backed on most tracks by Tricky's rapped vocals. According to the journalist Sean O'Hagan, she sang with a "broken voice" that acted as "the perfect foil to Tricky's whispered and drawled raps". The liner notes credited Tricky and Topley-Bird for vocals on all songs except "Pumpkin" and "You Don't", which Tricky performed with Alison Goldfrapp and Ragga, respectively. A printing error mistakenly credited the then-unknown Topley-Bird as "Martine" on the record. Other musicians were recruited to play instruments for some tracks, including James Stevenson on guitar and Pete Briquette on bass. The band FTV performed on "Black Steel", which was a rock version of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and one of two remakes on Maxinquaye; Tricky also remade one of his contributions for Massive Attack, "Karmacoma", retitling it as "Overcome". Saunders contributed guitar himself, with the resulting improvisations treated as samples.
Themes
Much of the thematic content on Maxinquaye is informed by Tricky's late mother. He explained the title's connection to his mother in an interview with Simon Reynolds, saying that "Quaye, that's this race of people in Africa, and 'Maxin,' that's my mum's name, Maxine, and I've just taken the E off"; Reynolds interpreted this as a "place name" similar to the Rastafarian idea of Zion. In another source, Tricky was reported as saying Quaye had also been his mother's surname. According to Greg Kot, his mother's name provided the album its title while her suicide, along with his father abandoning him and Tricky's lack of moral sense as a youth, helped inform his "unsentimental grasp on reality", which was reflected in Maxinquayes "collision of beauty and violence". In the opinion of Stylus Magazines Kenan Hebert, who called it "a document of obsession, mistrust, misconduct, solipsism and sociopathy", the songs dealing with dysfunctional sexual relationships and fear of intimacy were given a Freudian angle by his mother's influence on the album, including Tricky's reference to her on "Aftermath". In an interview for The Wire, Tricky explained his mother's influence and his use of female vocalists like Topley-Bird:While songs such as "Overcome" and "Suffocated Love" deal with themes of "sexual paranoia and male dread of intimacy", the rest of Maxinquaye explores the psychological tolls of British recreational drug culture, which Reynolds said once served as a "temporary utopia" for a generation of drug users who otherwise lacked a "constructive outlet for its idealism". He also felt that the album's cover art, featuring rusting metal surfaces, represented the cultural decline explored in the music's themes. Tricky drew on eschatological Rastafarian ideas of end times for the record, although unlike adherents to that movement, he did not disassociate himself from "Babylon" or the decadence of Western society; with lyrics such as "my brain thinks bomb-like/beware of our appetite" on "Hell Is Round the Corner", he said to Reynolds that "I'm part of this fuckin' psychic pollution ... It's like, I can be as greedy as you. The conditioned part of me says 'yeah, I'm gonna go out and make money, I'm going to rule my own little kingdom.'" Christgau deemed the album's songs "audioramas of someone who's signed on to work for the wages of sin and lived to cash the check", while O'Hagan said Tricky's "impressionistic prose poems" were written from the deviant perspective of the urban hedonist: "Maxinquaye is the sound of blunted Britain, paranoid and obsessive ... This was the inner-city blues, Bristol style".
The songs "Ponderosa", "Strugglin'" and "Hell Is Round the Corner" were inspired by Tricky's experiences with marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and ecstasy, particularly a two-year binge and consequent state of despondency while on Massive Attack's payroll after the completion of Blue Lines. His stream-of-consciousness lyrics on Maxinquaye explore the delirious, despondent and emotionally unstable state associated with drug use while offering a pessimistic view of the drug culture, as Tricky viewed the high of cocaine as undeserved and the depth of thought achieved through ecstasy as unsubstantial. In Reynolds' opinion, Tricky's experiences with drug-induced paranoia, anxiety and visions of spectres and demons were represented in the production of songs such as "Aftermath", "Hell Is Round the Corner" and "Strugglin'". On the latter track, he sampled sounds of creaking doors, the click of a gun being loaded, distant sirens and vinyl crackles, with Tricky's lyrics making explicit reference to visions of "mystical shadows, fraught with no meaning". For "Hell Is Round the Corner", he altered and slowed down a vibrato vocal sample, creating a disorienting effect resembling a basso profondo singer, over a loop of an orchestral Isaac Hayes recording, "Ike's Rap II".